Gender Stereotypes and the Mystery Genre: From Christie to Rendell

In the mystery genre, no one can compare with the amazing British authors Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. The first of these authors created the genre* while the second one took it to incredible heights in a number of extremely well-crafted novels. Compared with the psychological and literary sophistication of Rendell's work, Christie's novels seem primitive. The language is simple, the characters are one-dimensional, and the plots are quite similar.

One thing, however, is shared by the two queens of the detective genre. Both Christie and Rendell know extremely well how to manipulate the gender stereotypes of their times to create a mystery their readers will not be able to solve. Take, for example, Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger and Ruth Rendell's A Fatal Inversion**. In The Moving Finger, Christie attempts to prevent the readers from guessing the identity of the criminal by relying on their misogynistic vision of what constitutes "male" and "female" kinds of crime. This particular gender stereotype has lost its currency completely in the decades that elapsed since the novel was published. As a result, The Moving Finger is one of the lesser known of Christie's novels. A modern-day reader will have no trouble guessing what really happened since the gender stereotype is the only thing standing between the reader and the realization of the criminal's identity.

Ruth Rendell's A Fatal Inversion is one of this prolific author's best mysteries***. Vulnerability is the topic she explores in this novel in a stunningly successful way. Her characters are vulnerable to all kinds of things: sexual obsession, insanity, the desire to fit in at all costs, fear of rejection, the desire to fit in, alcoholism. The question of which one of them will prove to be the only truly resilient one remains unanswered until the stunning ending of the book. However, if it were not for our deeply-ingrained gender stereotypes, that ending would not surprise us in the least.

Hopefully, the gender stereotypes that Rendell based her novel on will pass into oblivion one day, just like the ones that informed Christie's outdated mystery I have discussed here****.

* Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle created the genre of the police procedural, not the mystery novel as such. Christie's Hercule Poirot makes vicious fun of Sherlock Holmsian type of characters. Rendell has written quite a few police procedurals (her Inspector Wexford series), which I consider to be vastly inferior to her mystery novels.

** The novel was published under Rendell's nom de plume Barbara Vine.

*** A Fatal Inversion, The Bridesmaid and Thirteen Steps Down are Rendell's best novels, in my opinion. If I weren't wary of making this list too long, I would add The Chimney Sweeper's Boy and No Night Is Too Long to the list of her best work. If you like the mystery genre but still have not read anything by Rendell, what are you waiting for? She is absolutely the best. 

**** I have tried to discuss the plots of these novels as little as possible here to avoid spoiling the pleasure of their future readers.

More Books by Rendell Available on KIndle

Dear fellow Kindle owners,

more books by Ruth Rendell have appeared in the Amazon's Kindle store. There are now some well-known classics such as Going Wrong, Tree of Hands, The Veiled One: An Inspector Wexford Mystery, The Killing Doll, Live Flesh, and a few others that you can read on Kindle. The prices are more than decent. None of these books are priced at over $9.99, and many cost around $7.

I check Amazon's Kindle store for new books by Rendell almost every day. As you know, it always takes a while for us to get European books in Kindle format because of copyright constraints. Still, it's nice to see that Amazon is making significant efforts to keep its promise to bring every book to us in Kindle format. Enjoy!

Ruth Rendell's Tigerlily's Orchids

Life is hard for us, American-based fans of the incomparable mystery author Ruth Rendell. Every time her new book comes out, we either have to sit around waiting for over 18 months for an American edition to come out, or hunt around for a copy someone might have brought from Great Britain and might be willing to sell. Some people, of course, are lucky enough to have close friends in Great Britain and can pester them for a copy of Rendell's new book. I have not been blessed in this department, so I have to cast my lot with used books sites.

Ruth Rendell is admirable on several accounts. As an auto-didact, she has a range of vocabulary and the breadth of erudition that many of her Oxford-educated peers do not possess. She is 80 years old, but this prolific writer keeps releasing new books on a regular basis. The great changes that have taken place in our Western societies over the last 50 years and the incapacity of many people to adapt to said changes form one of Rendell's favorite topics. Still, this writer who was born in 1930 has an astonishing understanding of today's realities. In my favorite novel by Rendell ever, 13 Steps Down, she created a memorable character of Gwendolen Chawcer, an elderly bookish spinster who is terrified of "new-fangled" (her favorite word) devices such as computers and microwaves. Even though Rendell understands how terrifying modern reality can be to older people, she seems to have a perfect grasp of today's modes of existence.

Her most recent novel* Tigerlily's Orchids (Import Edition) Hardback is not Ruth Rendell's best work but it's still a joy to read. The book is light on mystery. You pretty much know exactly what's going to happen, and there is little (if any) suspense. The strength of Tigerlily's Orchids (as well as of this writer's entire corpus of work) lies in Rendell's gift of creating delightfully quirky characters who are weird in most endearing ways. I am usually horrible with characters' names (which, believe me, is a huge problem for a literary critic.) You can see me engrossed in a book and ask me what the names of the protagonists are, and more often than not I will not be able to say. Ruth Rendell, however, is so good at creating memorable characters that even my unreliable memory always retains their names.

What I like the most about Rendell's books is her skill in taking any minor quirk in a character's personality and demonstrate how this touch of strangeness can gradually develop into full blown insanity, taking this character along some very dangerous paths. I might be projecting here, but I believe that everybody has this little place within them that houses some uncanny oddity, some little spot of the bizarre, some minor obsession. We keep it under control - for the most part - but it's very pleasurable to imagine it unleashed, they way it is in Rendell's books. I have read interviews with Ruth Rendell and I have no idea where this proper and quite sheltered older lady** found her deep knowledge of the darker side of human psyche. Still, nobody writing today describes a gradual slippage into insanity better than Rendell.

If there is a Rendell fan among my readers, please make yourself known. I have tried foisting Rendell's books on everybody around me but, somehow, I can't find a true lover of Rendell's books among people I know.

* Rendell's The Vault is scheduled to appear in 2011 to the delight of her fans all over the world.

** Rendell is also a very kind human being. When I was a teenager in Ukraine, I wrote her a letter to express my admiration of her novels, and she responded with a long letter and a gift of books. It was next to impossible to find new Enlgish-language books in my country at that time, so this gift was priceless to me.

Rendell

It's summer, so it's time to read for fun. I mean, if not now, when? For me, fun relaxing reading invariably means mystery novels. So I want to share my love for somebody who in my opinion is the best living mystery writer in the world: Ruth Rendell (she also sometimes writes as Barbara Vine.)

Rendell has a regular smart-detective-obtuse-sidekick series (Inspector Wexford Series). Those who like traditional mysteries with a murder, a police investigation, and a revelation at the end, would certainly enjoy them. I, however, prefer other books by Rendell.

Her main strength, in my view, is the way she writes about characters who are initially slightly eccentric but who gradually experience a descent into insanity. The writing is really good, the plots are gripping. She achieves that, however, not so much through action as through atteention to character development. Rendell doesn't write about car chases or the mafia. She doesn't pile on bodies or go for gory details. The tension in her novels mounts slowly but inexorably. The characters she creates are among the most memorable you will ever encounter. Rendell's books are not about shocking the readers, they are about showing us the horrors that often hide behind the mundane, the ordinary, the seemingly insignificant.

Here are some of my favorite novels by her: